Warm Bodies

Getting cozy with the undead.

“Don’t be creepy, don’t be creepy, don’t be creepy,” the
lovesick zombie begs himself as he stares, slack-jawed, at the very
blond, very alive object of his affection.

His name is “R” (he
thinks) and he’s your average twentysomething zombie. He spends his days
groaning and shuffling through an airport, dining on people meat or
collecting trinkets to decorate the cluttered “home” he’s made in an
abandoned jetliner. He’s conflicted about all the killing but,
considering his only way to reconnect to the world is to download a
human’s memories by devouring their brains, he’ll take it. That is,
until he locks eyes with shotgun-wielding Julie and falls
head-over-undead-heels in love.

In a movie genre
already clogged with teens trysting with milquetoast vampires and hunky
werewolves, forcing zombies to woo humans sounds like a calculating
supernatural romance cash grab. But director Jonathan Levine’s goofy
wisp of a film, Warm Bodies, based on Seattle author Isaac
Marion’s 2011 novel, is a charming lurch through zombieland that
bypasses the usual headshots to aim at the heart—and scores a
surprisingly direct hit.

It helps that Nicholas Hoult (About a Boy, X-Men: First Class)
is the world’s cutest corpse: all mussed hair, starburst eyes and
deep-shadowed lids…and a little mouth slime. After saving Julie from his
“friends” (including a hilariously marble-mouthed Rob Corddry), he
courts her with canned fruit cocktail and Coronas, struggling to connect
through grunts and cuts from his scavenged record collection—including
Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart.” Men do a lot of strange things for a date,
but this is the only case (so far) of a dude eating a girl’s
boyfriend’s brain in order to get to know her better.

When Julie (Teresa Palmer, in Kristen Stewart’s oversized army jacket from Twilight)
starts to warm up to her undead suitor, he, in turn, remembers how to
be human. Eventually the pair must face skeletal, fury-filled zombies
called “bonies” and, even scarier, John Malkovich (as the human
resistance leader and Julie’s dad).

Let’s be clear: This
is a popcorn flick. The CGI effects are laughable, and it takes a while
to adjust to the willfully cheeseball tone,but once it clicks, it’s irresistible. In this world, all you need is love. And sometimes a shotgun.